Another shell blasts the pathetic remains of Virginia news media.
After a century-and-a-half of independent ownership, Norfolk’s Virginian-Pilot severed its last connection with the Batten family, which had run the newspaper since 1955, with the sale to the Chicago-based Tronc Inc. media chain. Style Weekly, Richmond’s weekly alternative to the Richmond Times-Dispatch, was included in the $34 million deal.
Tronc touts its ability as one of the largest newspaper companies in the U.S. to centralize operations and make investments needed to keep the newspaper competitive. It had better be good. Like other regional newspapers, the Virginian-Pilot has suffered a steady erosion of circulation and loss of display advertising, which it has been unable to offset through increased online sales.
I’m working from a fallible memory here, but I recall that the Virginian-Pilot print circulation once exceeded 240,000 — maybe closer to 300,000. The most recent number: 132,000. Like its in-state rival, the Richmond Times-Dispatch, the Pilot also has shrunk its page count drastically. (The T-D recently packaged local news, the business page, and the editorial page in a pathetic eight-page section. Once upon a time, newspapers aimed for a 50/50 advertising-editorial page count. That T-D front-age section had about two pages of ads.)
Expect more downsizing as Tronc integrates the Virginian-Pilot with the Daily Press on the far side of the James River, which it also owns. The strategy of most newspaper companies these days appears to be slashing expenses and maintaining cash flow as long as possible, even if it means cannibalizing their print operations.
Bacon’s bottom line: I started my journalistic career as a summer intern at the Virginian-Pilot. I had a great experience there, and it set me up to land a job at the (then-independent) Martinsville Bulletin after college. A couple of years later, I moved on to another Batten family-owned property, the Roanoke Times & World-News. The Batten family upheld the highest standards of journalism. And Frank Batten Sr., who donated hundreds of millions of dollars to educational institutions across Virginia, was one of the great philanthropists in Virginia history.
I was blessed to work in the industry during its golden age of profitability when newspapers could afford to pay staffs of investigative reporters who conducted in-depth research on enterprise projects not expected to pay off for months. Such luxuries are long gone. Today, newspapers don’t have staffs capable of covering basic functions of government. Thanks to various sponsorships that have supported this blog over the years, I have covered the Commonwealth Transportation Board and the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia, which oversee transportation and higher education in the state– and I was typically the only reporter at the board meetings. Now that those sponsorships have expired, literally no one is reporting consistently on those crucial topics.
One possible successor to the dying advertising-, circulation- and profit-driven business model of the past is a nonprofit model supported by fund-raising and endowments. Whether journalism-as-charity can fill the void is a big question. I expect that it can for certain topics favored by wealthy philanthropists such as the environment and possibly social-justice issues. I would be amazed if the nonprofit model will do much for state budgets, taxes, transportation, land use, economic development, health care, K-12 education, higher education, public safety, or general state administration — much less for journalism at the local-government level.
Even the geniuses in Silicon Valley haven’t been able to figure out a business model. Google and Facebook are parasitical, feeding off the content created by the dying newspapers. Yahoo! tried creating its own news content, but that has flopped. Local-level digital news initiatives also have gone bust. Solutions, if they come, will emerge from rampant trial-and-error experimentation at the local level. I’m confident that a viable business model eventually will emerge from the debris.
